Space, in brief

Reflect Orbital, a US start-up that wants mirrors in orbit to shine sunlight onto Earth at night, staged a light test near Lone Pine, California, on 10 October. [2]

It has no mirrors in space yet, so it angled large floodlights over a mountainside to copy a beam coming down from orbit. [1][2]

The light was slightly brighter than a full Moon, Sky & Telescope reported, and one local called it blinding. [2][1]

The company invited two volunteer rescue groups, who carried stretchers and ran grid searches under the light. [2]

Reflect Orbital says rescue teams will be its first customers, and it plans to charge $5,000 an hour for its light. [1][2]

The US Bureau of Land Management, which a local rescuer says likely runs that land, says it was not told or consulted. [2] Inyo County's health department heard about the test only when a worried resident called. [2]

Astronomers who have been talking to the company, including a group of about 40 called COMPASSE, also learned of the test from the news. [2]

The US Federal Communications Commission, which licenses satellites, approved the company's first test mirror, Earendil-1, in July. [2] Its mirror is about 18 metres across, and it is due to launch next year. [1][2]

The American Astronomical Society had asked the regulator to refuse it. [2] In August, four groups represented by Earthjustice, an environmental law group, asked it to reconsider. [1][2]

The full plan is about 50,000 mirror satellites some 625 km up, each lighting a patch about 5 km wide for about four minutes before it passes over the horizon. [2][1]

Astronomers say the glare would wash out the sky far beyond each beam, and an Earthjustice lawyer said all life evolved to the rhythm of day and night. [2][1]

People near Lone Pine are now discussing adding light from space to Inyo County's rules on outdoor lighting at night. [2]

Why it matters. The next marker is the regulator's answer to the August request to undo its approval, before Earendil-1, the first real mirror, is due to launch next year. [1][2]

Cowboy Space, a rocket and satellite start-up, unveiled Big Iron on Monday evening, a rocket whose upper stage is meant to stay in orbit as a data centre. [3] The steel rocket would stand 86 metres tall and lift more than 15,000 kg on nine engines burning methane. [3] In orbit, each upper stage would open solar wings 132 by 73 metres and run five racks of Nvidia computer chips. [3] Its outer skin would double as the radiator that sheds the chips' heat. [3] The first flight is aimed at 2028. [3]

Why it matters. Cowboy says it is building its own rocket because space on other rockets is scarce, but many of its rivals, like Big Iron itself, have not flown yet. [3] Its first test satellite, Reason-1, should try beaming power to the ground by laser in the next few weeks. [3]

Astranis, a US company that builds small satellites for high orbits, said on Monday it has upgraded a booking into a whole SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2028, so it gets all of the rocket's room. [4] The rocket will carry all six satellites of its next batch, called Block 4. [4] An extra stage from Impulse Space, called Helios, will take them straight to geostationary orbit, the high orbit where a satellite seems to hang over one spot. [4] The launch would bring Astranis's fleet to 16. [4]

Why it matters. Astranis says governments and companies increasingly want satellites they control themselves, instead of a share of someone else's. [4] It has signed customers for the six but has not named them. [4]

India's space agency, ISRO, plans to launch NVS-03 on Friday 30 October from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on a GSLV Mk II rocket. [5] NVS-03 belongs to India's own satellite navigation system, which, unlike GPS, serves only the Indian region. [5] It will sit high above one point on the equator, at 32.5 degrees East, and is meant to work for 10 years. [5] Its GSLV Mk II rocket can lift about 2,500 kg towards that high orbit. [5]

Why it matters. Navigation satellites tell phones, ships and planes where they are, and India is building a set that serves its own region. [5] This would be only ISRO's third launch this year, while SpaceX plans three Falcon 9 flights in this one week. [5]

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was due to fly its 700th mission at 08:25 UTC on Tuesday from California, carrying 27 Starlink internet satellites. [5][6] The flight had slipped from 23 October, after delays to an earlier Starlink launch from the same pad. [5] Its first stage, booster B1082, has flown since January 2024 and is making its 26th flight. [6] A secret US Space Force satellite is due on another Falcon 9 on 1 November, the rocket's 119th mission this year. [5]

Why it matters. Flying one first stage again and again is a large part of how SpaceX launches so often: three Falcon 9 flights are planned this week alone. [5] Of B1082's 25 earlier flights, 21 carried SpaceX's own Starlink satellites. [6]

Scientists led by Bibhuti Kumar Jha of the Southwest Research Institute, a US research group, have a new way to track sunspots on the side of the Sun facing away from Earth. [9] The Sun takes about 27 days to turn, so a dangerous region can grow out of sight. [9] The method reads sound waves moving inside the Sun, and the team checked it against pictures from NASA's two STEREO craft taken from 2010 to 2014. [9] It found older models missed 10 to 20% of the Sun's magnetism. [9]

Why it matters. Eruptions from sunspots can damage satellites and overload power grids, and today the warning often comes only once a sunspot turns towards Earth. [9] Universe Today calls it a step, not yet a working early-warning system. [9]

Astronomers report a gamma-ray burst, one of the most powerful kinds of explosion, whose source kept flaring in X-rays for about 27 days. [7] The previous record for such a late flare was about six days. [7] The burst, GRB 220706A, was seen on 6 July 2022, and the study is an early version not yet checked by other scientists. [7] Nobody knows what kept it going: one idea is a magnetar, a dead star with a very strong magnetic field. [7]

Why it matters. Bursts this long are hard to follow because most detectors circle Earth about every 90 minutes and keep losing sight of them. [7] Newer X-ray telescopes such as the Einstein Probe may catch more, Gompertz says. [7]

Earth briefly captures small asteroids as mini-moons, which usually stay about nine months and circle about three times before leaving. [8] Grigori Fedorets of Finland's University of Helsinki, who presented the work in September, estimates the biggest one at any moment is about 75 cm wide. [8] Only two have been confirmed, both found by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. [8] A possible third, Sar2901, may instead be something people made, and should be visible again in mid to late November. [8]

Why it matters. The Rubin Observatory, a new survey telescope, should catch about one every two years, Fedorets estimates. [8] Mini-moons move slowly near Earth, so a mission to fetch a piece of one would need less fuel. [8]

A study in Geophysical Research Letters used computer models to look at waves on the outer edge of Earth's magnetic field. [10] That field is the shield that turns away most of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles from the Sun. [10] The waves were not the same in the north and south: they were strongest over the hemisphere having winter. [10] The Sun's own magnetic field decided whether the dawn or dusk side got more. [10]

Why it matters. Space weather can harm satellites and ground stations, and the authors want better space weather forecasts. [10] Lead author Lauri Holappa, of Finland's University of Oulu, first noticed the pattern in computer pictures in 2020. [10]

Astronomers led by Maite Wilhelm of Leiden University in the Netherlands say Orion's brightest star formed when two stars merged. [12] The stars in the Orion Nebula, the nearest big star nursery to Earth at about 1,400 light years, are about a million years old. [12] But the nebula's shell of gas looks only about 0.3 million years old, and the dusty discs round its young stars should have been stripped away long ago. [12] A recent merger would have made the star brighter, so its light stripped the discs faster. [12]

Why it matters. Co-author Simon Portegies Zwart says it is the first time the results of a major star collision have been seen this close to us. [12] The discs being stripped are where planets form, and lead author Wilhelm says such a merger may affect planets that are still forming. [12]

Masatomi Iizawa of the Technical University of Braunschweig and colleagues studied readings from NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a craft that flies close to the Sun. [11] They found pairs of magnetic twists turning opposite ways in the solar wind. [11] The twists sit at the size where the wind stops acting like a flowing fluid and starts acting like single particles. [11] The pattern vanished once a stream crossed the sheet that divides the Sun's two magnetic directions. [11]

Why it matters. The twists seem to stop energy from turning into heat and build bigger structures instead. [11] That bears on an old question: why the Sun's outer layer is millions of degrees hotter than its surface. [11]

Researchers at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, have built Lumina, one of the largest simulations of how the early universe's gas changed. [13] Light from young galaxies, and later from gas falling into giant black holes, stripped electrons off hydrogen and helium, a change called reionization. [13] Lumina covers a cube about 1.5 billion light years on each side and ran on more than 15,000 graphics chips on Frontier, a US supercomputer. [13] Its helium results match what telescopes have measured. [13]

Why it matters. The James Webb Space Telescope is sending back pictures of that early era, and lead author Oliver Zier says models like this turn theories into predictions the pictures can test. [13]

Colare, a start-up in San Francisco, launched a service on Monday that tests engineers on the kind of hardware choices a job would ask of them. [14] It closed a first funding round of $2.5m at the same time. [14] Its founders say space firms are flooded with job applications written by AI, and that hiring one engineer can take about 40 hours. [14] Space companies raised more than $6.6bn in the first half of 2026, Payload reports. [14]

Why it matters. Payload says nearly all of those rounds paid at least partly for more engineers. [14] Colare argues a wrong hire can mean missed contract deadlines or launch delays. [14]